Chapter 2 ‘Reading unprofitable romances’: gender, identity and the romance genre

Writing on romance books: women’s annotations and inscriptions

Despite this cultural opprobrium surrounding the genre, women in the seventeenth century frequently did read and enjoy romances. Much of the evidence we have for this comes from records of ownership, particularly the book inventories and library catalogues of noblewomen. Frances Stanley Egerton, the Countess of Bridgewater, had several romances and works of literary fiction in her library.³² The catalogue was compiled in 1627, with additions into the early 1630s, and attests to the range of genres enjoyed by the countess. Works such as folios of Mary Wroth’s Urania; John Barclay’s Argenis; Les Amours de Clidamant et Marilinde by Nicolas des Escuteaux (1570–1628); and L’Astrée by Honoré d’Urfé (a hugely popular work both in France and abroad),³³ all well-known seventeenth-century romances, are present in the library.³⁴ The book list of the Countess of Carlisle, Lady Anne Howard (née de Vere Capell), also included several romances and poems, such as Le Grand Cyrus by Madeleine de Scudéry and an unidentified ‘Comicall Romance’.³⁵ Similarly, David McKitterick has noted the presence of contemporary romances in Elizabeth Puckering’s library, arguing that her partiality for the romance genre ‘ran true to what was widely considered female taste’.³⁶ Women also inscribed romances with their names or annotated the margins.³⁷ While most of these examples can only ever give hard evidence of ownership, Anne Clifford’s annotations in particular make it clear that she read and enjoyed romances.³⁸

Clifford left evidence of her reading through annotations on many of her books, either written in her own hand or by a scribe, and in The Great Picture, a triptych, commissioned by Clifford and showing her and her family at different stages of her life, always surrounded by books.³⁹ The middle panel, showing Anne aged fifteen, depicts her surrounded by books including works by Chaucer, Spenser and Ovid, Don Quixote, and Philip Sidney’s Arcadia.⁴⁰ The last of these, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia by Sir Philip Sidney, published in 1590, was annotated by Clifford. It is one of two romance books annotated by her, the other being John Barclay’s Argenis, although she was a prolific annotator of books of numerous genres. Clifford’s annotations reveal the careful and attentive ways in which she read and re-read them. Both Argenis and Arcadia have been portrayed by Paul Salzman as comments on contemporary politics.⁴¹ Salzman argues that Arcadia, which was very popular in the seventeenth century, was read during the reign of King James I as ‘a dark commentary on monarchical power and its abuse’.⁴² This was largely allegorical, but Argenis represented a more direct comment on recent history and contemporary politics: in Salzman’s words, it ‘offers an elaborate and detailed depiction of specific historical circumstances … but also a sophisticated series of meditations on current political issues’.⁴³

Clifford’s copy of Barclay’s Argenis is now held at the Huntington Library, and reveals a great deal about how Clifford read and her opinions on her reading.⁴⁴ On the blank page facing the title page, there is a manuscript note reading, ‘I began to reade this booke to yo^r Ladiship the xvi^th day of Jannary: 1625: and ended it the xxv^th of the same moneth.’⁴⁵ The volume is heavily annotated, both by Clifford and the unnamed scribe, probably indicating multiple readings on Clifford’s part. Clifford’s own annotations tend to be shorter, and either summarise sections of the text – for example, writing, ‘The strange discovery of the Poysoned Braselet’ beside the relevant text – or make personal comment on the writing – she wrote, ‘An exelent Chap:’ several times in the margins.⁴⁶ The scribe’s hand sometimes followed this pattern but also copied out certain underlined passages and wrote ‘note’ in the margins next to select sections.

The scribe’s annotations indicate sections that were of particular interest to Clifford, and could be quite political in nature. For example, next to a passage stating that ‘good Subjects should not exact such security; neither would they so often seeke it, if it were at any time safe. But they give their aydes, and obey or refuse the Kings commands, more like fellowes, then Subjects’, the scribe has written ‘to bee noted’.⁴⁷ On the same page, the word ‘note’ has been inscribed in the margins next to a sentence declaring, ‘[f]or as the hatred is most deadly, which is heated with controversies between severall religions; we must justly feare’.⁴⁸ Both of these passages could be taken as a comment on the religious and political climate of the mid-1620s, which saw the beginnings of the unrest that would eventually lead to the English Civil War. The second passage, certainly, warns starkly against religious factionalism and the ‘hatred’ that can emerge out of clashes between different religious sects. The first passage criticises subjects who have given aid to their ruler and then demand thanks, setting themselves as equals to the monarch. The paragraph goes on to accuse people acting in this way of making ‘themselves Iudges of the gods, and of their Princes; and measure what duety they owe to either, not by Religion, but according to their owne dispositions’.⁴⁹ This clearly emphasises the role of the king above his people, possibly reflecting Clifford’s political preoccupations at a time when the relationship between the King and Parliament (the representatives of the people) was under strain. Clifford herself underlined a passage saying, ‘So that most often the pampred fatnes of the people, and the apprehension of too much liberty, are greater enemies to the peace of the Common-wealth, than the sharpe rigor of Princes who have shewed greater severity’, and wrote in the margins, ‘The pampred fatnes of the people.’⁵⁰ This is quite clearly criticising the danger of allowing people ‘too much liberty’ for fear that this will disrupt the peace, and favours a king ruling harshly over the people holding too much power. These annotations suggest a preoccupation with the conflict between the people and the Crown, indicating Clifford’s own Royalist leanings in the unrest to come.

Clifford’s other annotated volumes include political works, such as Anthony Weldon’s indictment of James I (with whom Clifford had clashed over her inheritance claims), The Court and Character of King James and A Mirour for Magistrates, a collection of poems published in 1559 written from the perspective of various statesmen warning about the abuse of power.⁵¹ Both contain annotations that are often quite personal, drawing on her own political and familial experiences to understand the text.⁵² Some scholars have viewed the annotations of these political and romance texts through different lenses. Brayman Hackel has argued that, despite the topical nature of Barclay’s Argenis, Clifford’s reading of the text, attested to by the annotations, was ‘ultimately personal and idiosyncratic’ and more interested in the ‘narrative and philosophical elements of the romance’ than its political implications.⁵³ However, I would argue that, with her personal comments on political texts and political readings of romances, Clifford’s personal and political interests and opinions were often intertwined, and cannot be so easily delineated. Her marginalia give us an insight into those opinions. She certainly was not reading uncritically, frivolously or in order to ‘dream away her time in phantastic scenes’, as Allestree warned of romance readers. She read in order to find support and justification for her political views, and her annotations demonstrate her active engagement with that reading material, be it romances or political polemics.

Unfortunately, it is rare to find many examples of women annotating romance texts in the way that Clifford did, but there are certainly examples of women inscribing their names or short dedications on such books. In writing their names on romance books, women were making a potentially controversial statement, given the widespread disapproval of the genre. This may or may not have been intentional, or it may indicate that lack of influence that the cultural rhetoric surrounding romances had on actual readers.

Women may not have set out to make a subversive statement when inscribing their romance books, but some clearly did want to advertise either ownership or readership (or both).⁵⁴ An English translation of Vital d’Audiguier’s Histoire Trage-Comique de Nostre Temps (1635), for example, was signed by several women, including Margaret Corbyn, who used the blank page of the flyleaf to experiment with various different spellings of her name.⁵⁵ She also added to one signature the words ‘hir booke’, and further down the page, in a neater hand, wrote ‘Margrit Corbyn Eius Liber’. This Latin formulation, meaning ‘her book’, was unusual for women autographers, being much more common amongst scholarly men, who signed their book in this way or with the words ‘ex libris’ and then their name. As discussed above, romances were generally seen as being read for pleasure and having little or no educational value. Latin inscriptions, however, were more often found on scholarly works, and so Corbyn’s use of the phrase, indicating her education, potentially subverted these ideas about the romance genre.

Most women did not follow Corbyn’s use of Latin, but they did still use their signatures to make their ownership of the books clear. A copy of Jean Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin’s Ariana was signed by two related women: on the front flyleaf are the signatures of ‘M^rs Margret Carpenter har Booke Marche’ and ‘Elizabeth Carpenter’, along with further pen trials of Elizabeth’s name.⁵⁶ The pen trials may indicate that Elizabeth’s signature was motivated by writing practice rather than any particular relationship to the book, but Margaret obviously wanted to lay claim to the text itself. Some romances even bear multiple signatures from the same person, such as a copy of M. Le Roy Gomberville’s The History of Polexander which has the signature of Anne Townshend on both the title page and the first page of text. The former is followed by ‘her boke’, clearly claiming ownership of the text itself and indicating this was not simply writing practice.⁵⁷

The fact that women, even in the few examples mentioned here, signed and annotated their romance books indicates that perhaps the general condemnation of the genre by advice literature was not adhered to very strictly by the female reading public. Evidently, some women did not feel the need to hide their romance reading, and indeed advertised it to anyone who happened to come across their book. Moreover, they clearly were not reading romances passively, as most seventeenth-century advice literature feared. Clifford gives a valuable example of a woman who read her romances carefully, partly through a political lens.

Romances and femininity in women’s life-writing

While the annotations on romance literature suggest that the rhetoric surrounding it did not necessarily influence women’s choice to read the genre, the gendered assumptions and tropes underlying romance reading can be explored further by looking at how women write about romance reading. Because of the highly gendered nature of the conversation about the romance genre, the ways in which women represented the act of reading romantic fiction in their life-writings can demonstrate how individuals negotiated and constructed their own gender identity in life-writings. Using these sources does not, of course, reveal a lived experience of gender and identity, one that we might call ‘real’, while cognisant of the many problems associated with such a term. Instead, they provide a resource for looking at how women perceived themselves and wanted to be perceived by others. Scholars of seventeenth-century women’s autobiography have argued that ‘it is necessary to make choices and therefore exclusions in writing a life, so the act of writing involves a patterning and thus an interpretation’.⁵⁸ Therefore, when writing any form of autobiographical text, the author makes a choice to include certain aspects of their lived experience. Writing about reading romances reveals a particularly deliberate choice, given the contemporary controversy around the genre. Women, in recording their reading of and reaction to romantic fiction, were engaged in an explicit effort of textual self-construction, one which reveals their negotiation of early modern gender norms.

The uses to which women put romance reading in their own writings have been acknowledged in the last decade or so by some scholars, notably Ramona Wray and Julie Eckerle. Wray, examining Mary Rich’s autobiography and diary, has demonstrated the extent to which contemporary women’s reading of romances can be seen in their writings, even if they did not explicitly record it.⁵⁹ The spiritual motivations and methods behind women’s life-writing have been well explored in modern scholarship, but the secular influences less so.⁶⁰ The ideas put forward by conduct literature, even if not followed in practice, did have an effect on the wider cultural conversation surrounding gender. It is therefore useful to look at how women both replicated and rejected those ideals, and used them in the construction of their own character. Writing about reading romances had the potential to be quite a subversive act, challenging the norms of femininity and appropriate literary activity. However, some women used the acknowledgement of their romance reading to demonstrate their conforming or more traditionally feminine behaviour, by showing that they understood the error of their ways and had reformed.

The women discussed here by no means amount to a complete list of every woman who registered reading a romance. However, these four can be set apart from their contemporaries due to the detail they gave about their romance reading habits. Their discussions of romance all appeared in different forms of life-writing: Elizabeth Delaval and Elizabeth Isham wrote spiritual autobiographies, while Dorothy Osborne and Mary Hatton Helsby left evidence of romance reading in letters. Their works largely date from the mid-seventeenth century: Isham was writing in the 1630s and Delaval in the 1670s, but Osborne and Hatton Helsby’s letters both date from the 1650s. The timespan of this study does reflect the increasing popularity of the romance genre from the mid-seventeenth century onwards, but also the continuing influence of the rhetorical framing of romances from early seventeenth-century Puritan advice books, which emphasised the dangers of the genre. Taken together, the texts surveyed here demonstrate the range of reactions women could have to the romance genre, and reflect the influence (or lack thereof) of advice literature on the construction of feminine identity.

Lady Elizabeth Delaval (née Livingston) was an English noblewoman, who is known both for her memoirs and meditations and her involvement in the Pewter Pot plot of 1689, when a warrant was issued for her arrest for carrying correspondence from the exiled court of James II.⁶¹ She married Sir Robert Delaval, heir of Sir Ralph Delaval, in 1670, although the marriage was not a happy one and they had no children.⁶² Her Meditations, written between 1662 and 1671, record her early life, and give an insight into her reading habits. According to Delaval, she wrote the meditations between the ages of fourteen and twenty, and collected them together at twenty.⁶³ She used the memoir form to reflect on her youth, and ultimately to affirm her devotion and piety. The text is set out in the form of meditations, but largely contains autobiographical reflections on her life, returning repeatedly to repent her actions as a young girl. Despite Delaval’s manuscript providing extensive evidence, she has been given little critical attention by scholars of early modern reading.⁶⁴

Reading was important for Delaval’s personal story. She replicated common tropes of advice literature, such as the moral and highly gendered distinction between romance reading and religious reading. She charted her transition from the former to the latter in terms of the development of her spiritual wellbeing and increased piety. This is strikingly similar to the conversion trope used in some seventeenth-century advice literature, such as that of Richard Baxter or Richard Allestree. It is also reminiscent of Catholic conversion tales such as that of Teresa of Avila, who framed her life before her conversion as a series of failings, saved only by God’s grace.⁶⁵ Avila recorded reading chivalric romances with her mother as a girl. She portrayed this pastime as dangerous for her younger self, impeding her piety. However, she did not condemn her mother for her reading choices, instead suggesting that it was a necessary escape from her difficult life.⁶⁶ This fits with the impression given in advice literature, discussed above, that romances were most harmful when read by young women, often teenagers, who were at their most impressionable.

Delaval recorded reading celebrated seventeenth-century French romances when she was about ten years old, including Madeleine de Scudéry’s Artamènes, ou, Le Grand Cyrus and Cassandra by Gautier de Costes, seigneur de la Calprenède.⁶⁷ De Scudéry’s text was first translated into English in 1653, and Calprenède’s in 1652, so Delaval was reading them several years after the translation (she was born in 1649). She wrote, ‘I was but some few month’s past ten year’s old before I had red severall great volum’s of [romances]: all Cassander, the Grand Cyrus, Cleopatra and Astrea.’⁶⁸ Both De Scudéry and Calprenède were very popular in mid-seventeenth-century England.⁶⁹ Delaval’s record of them situates her within the mid-century romance market, demonstrating her interest in the staples of the genre.

She introduced a social and religious dimension to her representation of romances by blaming her literary habits on a family servant, Mistress Carter, who looked after Delaval as a young girl. Delaval accused Carter of encouraging a taste for romantic fiction and persuading her to neglect her religious devotions, saying that she ‘had so fill’d my head with foly’s that … what I red was alltogether romances’.⁷⁰ She connected this to Carter’s Presbyterianism, claiming,

I was not quite 6 month’s past 10 yeare old when Mris. Carter begun most pernicesouly to insinuate Presbiterian princeples into me, in some interval’s of time when she did not talke to me of love and fary tales; so that had I not been deliver’d soon out of her hand’s without doubt I shou’d have had the great misfortune of being bred up a Presbiterian.⁷¹

This provides a connection between Delaval’s reading of romances and religious dissent, adding another dimension to the idea of the conversion narrative and the religious rhetoric surrounding romance literature. Outlining Carter’s Presbyterianism allowed Delaval (an Anglican) to attribute her youthful behaviour to indoctrination, and emphasises the connection between romantic fiction and immorality. If taken as similar sins, then the implication is that reading romances is going against God, rather than simply an enjoyable leisure pursuit. This is, moreover, an unusual image of Presbyterianism, considering the general godly attitude towards romances. Perhaps Delaval was insinuating that Carter was undisciplined, unbiblical and lower class, as part of a general criticism of her religion. Carter’s social status is important; as Lori Humphrey Newcomb has demonstrated, ‘a class line was drawn between elite and popular romance forms, between credulous and knowing versions of female readers’.⁷² Carter here represents the former; a maidservant misusing her leisure time and tempting Delaval into unserious, credulous romance reading.

These early reading habits were presented as dangerous or foolish pastimes in comparison to the religious education she should have been developing: at one point she said, ‘thus vainely pass’d the blosome time of my life, which shou’d have been spent in laying a good foundation of what is to be learnt in such book’s as teach’s us heavenly wisdom’.⁷³ Once again, books and reading were the key to her character, as they could either provide spirituality and morality or lead one into temptation and sin; they were used to represent the two possible paths for Delaval to take. She went on to emphasise this link between romance reading and an avoidance of devotion, saying:

nothing seem’d to me so grieveous as to spend time in the learning of my duty in reading thy holy word and in praying to thee, nothing so pleasant as the waisting of my houer’s in foleish devertisment’s and in reading unprofitable romances.⁷⁴

Significant in this passage is the term ‘unprofitable’; romantic fiction was seen as carrying no lessons for spiritual, intellectual or moral improvement, and thus was not a productive use of women’s time. This replicates common narratives in advice literature, discussed above, which castigated women for passing time reading romances rather than scripture.

However, Delaval realised her errors and much of the rest of the first half of the Meditations is concerned with repudiating her early sins and reading habits. She wrote:

When we are past our childish age and can attend to what we do without a perpetuall wandering fancy tis folly to spend our time any longer in reading ill chosen boock’s, such as romances are, which serve onely to please our fancy not to guide our judgement, and to make our minutes passe away (tis said by some) less tediously then they wou’d do, were we otherwise imploy’d.⁷⁵

Romances therefore were simply pleasurable, used to ‘please out fancy not to guide our judgement’. Although she admitted the attraction of this, as it made time pass quickly, she argued that it was ‘folly’ to spend time reading the genre. Delaval became a devout woman, stressing that, ‘When some other duty dos not take up my time, I will not only read every day in my closet alone or to my servants in the gospels, but also in the Psalmes.’⁷⁶ This meditation was written several years after the two quoted above, demonstrating Delaval’s continuing preoccupation with her reformation. It is worth noting that Delaval made it clear that religious reading is not simply an adherence to her duty; rather, she charted her emotional development and reaction, coming to actively prefer devotional texts – at one point in the text she mentioned how she now ‘delights’ in ‘holy books’. Her ‘conversion’ was now complete and was evidenced through her reading habits.

In Delaval’s dichotomy between romance reading and religious reading, she did not see them as genres that can be read in tandem, but condemned romance reading completely. Her reformation and later preference for devotional literature thus affirms her pious character all the more by constructing it in opposition to her youthful transgressions. Through this representation of her reading habits, Delaval aligned herself with a certain kind of ideal femininity, and situated herself firmly within the domestic sphere of adulthood and proper devotion. She portrayed herself as taking on the role of the pious wife, as outlined by Gouge and Whately, in reading scripture to her servants and spending her days in spiritual reflection. The fact that her religious leanings were very different to the Puritanism of Gouge and Whately indicates the extent to which this idea of a gendered asceticism permeated throughout early modern society. The attitudes displayed by Gouge, Whately, Baxter and Allestree, and replicated by Delaval, attest to the strength of the concern surrounding female reading, from all religious groups. However, Delaval has also made a choice to use reading as a way of constructing her femininity within the text. This is not evidence of her submissiveness to contemporary gender prescriptions, but rather of the agency she had in taking those prescriptions and conventions and using them to present her character in a certain way.

This replication of the cultural controversy surrounding romance reading, however, was not employed in all women’s life-writing. Instead, many women openly enjoyed or at least engaged with romances. Even godly women discussed reading romances, demonstrating the extent to which the stereotype of Puritan culture needs to be complicated. Elizabeth Isham (1608–1654), the Northamptonshire diarist, recorded romance reading in her Booke of Rememberance, an autobiography written in about 1639.⁷⁷ In her autobiography, Isham took a very different position to that of Delaval regarding romantic fiction. Although the manuscript was primarily concerned with demonstrating her spirituality, she also revealed a wide range of reading habits and took a much more nuanced view than Delaval of non-devotional genres.⁷⁸ In one section she wrote:

my friends thinking that the Booke of Marters made me mallancoly though I found no hearm it did my brother lent me Sir phillips sidnes Booke (and after Spencer) which I hard much comended by some. and others againe discomended the reading of such Bookes of love. but I found no such hurt.⁷⁹

Isham’s construction of romantic fiction here, particularly in relation to religious reading, demonstrates the complexity of the cultural reaction to romances. She noted that her friends and brother recommended reading romances and poetry – in this case, Sidney’s Arcadia and Spenser’s The Faerie Queene – as an antidote to the melancholy they thought the Book of Martyrs provoked in her.⁸⁰ This is an inverse of the usual contemporary narrative of religious reading being an antidote to melancholy or other ills brought on by reading. She even repeatedly emphasised that she found no ‘hearm’ or ‘hurt’ in reading romances, distancing herself from the critiques of the genre.

Isham struggled with her mental health, and books often provided a comfort for her, as well as provoking melancholy. Anne Cotterill has noted that books were generally brought into the household by men (and indeed were usually written by men), and argues that they ‘came to represent a prop of masculine strength of mind and body, a calming and clarifying power that Isham found women so often required’.⁸¹ She frequently used scripture for comfort, and was deeply religious.⁸² However, it is notable that she recorded romances possibly having a similarly salutary effect (although she did not confirm that Arcadia helped her; rather that her friends believed it might). In using them for comfort, and openly admitting to reading them, she clearly defied the binary constructed by godly advice literature between romance and religious literature.

In the passage above, Isham acknowledged the divisions within the rhetoric surrounding romantic fiction, but affirmed that she did not find it damaging or problematic.⁸³ Indeed, she recorded in a note in the margins that she continued to read Sidney’s book ‘for the most part on evenings’.⁸⁴ Reading the romance clearly became part of her everyday routine, as she read it repeatedly at a specific point during the day, and Isham’s acceptance of the gender, and rejection of the fears surrounding romantic fiction, is particularly notable when situated in the wider field of autobiographical writings, which rarely discussed romances.⁸⁵ Isham treated romances like other books, and clearly did not accept the warnings of godly advice writings.

The generic expectations of godly or spiritual autobiography meant that romance reading was not always recorded, even if it may have occurred. In letters, however, audience and conventions were different, and as such they sometimes contained extensive discussions of romance reading. Although there has been plenty of work demonstrating that early modern letters were not private, and that there was an assumption that the audience would extend beyond the recipient, there was still an arguably different readership, one which was more fleeting and less intergenerational than memoirs or spiritual autobiographies, and therefore there was less concern about constructing a character for posterity or exemplification.⁸⁶ Letters often function as more of a conversation, rather than a record of events, so the construction of character occurs in a different way.

When gentry women did mention their reading of prose romance in letters, therefore, they rarely condemned the genre in the way that Delaval did. Women’s analyses of their reading were not always aligned so clearly to contemporary moralistic mores, and cannot be so easily divided into either finding pleasure in romances or finding them corrupting and immoral. Women (perhaps less pious women than Delaval) recorded complex critiques or praise of romantic fiction, reflecting highly individual and personal responses, and often emphasising the ‘profit’ they gained from their reading. As Eckerle has noted, ‘although references to romance reading frequently acknowledge pleasure, they not surprisingly emphasise moral, emotional, and intellectual engagement even more’.⁸⁷ Women in the seventeenth century clearly read their romances carefully, and with a critical eye. They assessed the plots, characters and themes, and discussed their reading with others.

This discussion, certainly in epistolary form, appears to have largely been a heterosocial interaction. I have found no letters between women that contain extensive discussion of romances. There is some evidence, such as that of Dorothy Osborne explored below, of women sharing books with other women. However, most of the evidence of in-depth discussion appears between men and women, often those either engaged or married. Elizabeth Pepys, the wife of the diarist Samuel Pepys, for example, is known to have enjoyed Madeleine de Scudéry’s Le Grand Cyrus (1649–1653), and wanted to talk about it with her husband.⁸⁸ Kate Loveman has argued that ‘discussing the ideas in a heroic romance was a means for men and women to establish shared understandings on a variety of issues related to conduct (especially conduct in love), to advertise them as discerning, sensitive readers, and to exchange tacit compliments’.⁸⁹ While we need to be wary of attributing romantic endeavour as a motive for women’s engagement with romances, it is true that many of the discussions of the genre come from letters between suitors or spouses. Two of the best-known examples of women discussing romances with their fiancés are the letters of Mary Hatton (later Helsby) and Dorothy Osborne.

Mary Hatton, whose letters are held in the Folger Shakespeare Library, demonstrated a critical reading of romantic fiction, and did not conceal the fact that she had read them. Little is known about Hatton but her letters to her fiancé, Randolph Helsby (of the Helsby family based in Cheshire), in the early 1650s, have survived. They show the pair exchanging books frequently, including romances.⁹⁰ In one letter, Hatton wrote this commentary:

I do not methinks approve of stories of romance all so alike that they seem as if I had read y^e same one hundred times, besides that how vain it was (for him which writt it) to make ye yong gentle woman run awaie wth a sweet hearte (her younger of manie years) when all were agreed upon ye matche save only his more sober unkle. Tis as olde as Helsby towre but this, and this is in deede some thing very freshe & newe as such a youthe could make itt. If you have not read itt I would advise you sadly if by my commendations you would waste a candell over itt. I had rather do some thing of more use than he that writ it by turning m wheel without a stop till some other had read throu itt in my stead. But it hath little bits in itt that shewe he could not with carefulness & practise be without much commendation. I do scorne & disdaine these scribling pass times & nought else can I learne from manie of them.⁹¹

As Emily Griffiths Jones suggests, this could seem like a commonplace indictment of romantic fiction, with Hatton even asserting her femininity by saying that she would prefer to be spinning than reading the book in question.⁹² However, this is a more complex critique. Hatton here was engaging with the characters, and contending with the authority of the writer and their motivations. She did criticise romances, and drew on some of the rhetoric dismissing them as a misuse of leisure time, but her letters did not reflect the moral condemnation of conduct book writers. Her criticism stemmed from what she personally found lacking in romantic fiction; she was reading in order to learn something, but her expectations were thwarted. She called the texts ‘scribling pass times’ and declared ‘nought else can I learne from manie of them’, quite clearly setting up an active/passive divide. This suggests that, even if she was not ultimately rewarded for her pains, she read romances with the aim of reading providing some sort of transformative experience, with the absorption of a lesson.

Her reading was also relational. As Paul Trolander has suggested, Hatton was using books and reading to find common ground with Randolph Helsby, solidifying social bonds through shared experiences or views. He has claimed that her ‘strong condemnation of the entire genre’ was a way of testing her future husband. Trolander argues that Hatton

suggested that such texts took away from time that might be used to cultivate more socially appropriate beliefs and practices. To differ with such views might be possible, but in the context of courtship, such censure was a line drawn in the sand. If Helsby was morally challenged, uncritical, and a time-waster, he was surely not the man for Mary.⁹³

In fact, Hatton did not roundly condemn all romantic fiction, nor did she suggest that there was nothing worthy of praise to be found in the stories. She seems to argue that it is the unnamed author’s failings that are the problem, not the genre of romance. If he had more ‘carefulness and practise’, she wrote, then he would be commendable as a writer, and she can already discern hints of this in the text. Unfortunately, it is unclear to which author or text she was referring specifically. Her letters demonstrate a familiarity with the genre as a whole, implying that she did generally enjoy reading such books. In an earlier letter she wrote, ‘I am reading of your newe booke of Mr Spenser w^ch I like well. I do believe his poetry for excellency is as abundently great & in as handsome & pretty language as many of the beste in the worlde.’⁹⁴ She clearly enjoyed Spenser, admiring his use of language, although it is difficult to tell which of Spenser’s works she read.⁹⁵ Poetry was often condemned alongside romances in seventeenth-century advice literature, but Hatton clearly had no qualms about reading either genre. Her letters reveal her discerning taste; she did not see the poetry and romances as irretrievably bad or immoral, but was critical of stories that did not have much literary merit.

In Dorothy Osborne’s letters to her suitor, William Temple, she provided a similarly nuanced, although much more positive, critique of romances. Osborne (1627–1695) was a Royalist, daughter of the lieutenant-governor of Jersey, who played a part in arranging the marriage of William of Orange and Mary, the daughter of James, Duke of York. She is best known today as a letter-writer, particularly her letters to Temple that survive for the period 1652–1654.⁹⁶ Her letters are a valuable resource for examining the complexity of women’s responses to the romance genre. Osborne read many of the same texts as Delaval, including various works by French author Madeleine de Scudéry, but, unlike Delaval, she did not openly repent her reading. She frequently recommended romances that she read to Temple, and discussed her opinions of the stories and their authors with him, just as Mary Hatton and Randolph Helsby shared their impressions and recommendations of reading. In one instance, she sent him several volumes of the romance Cleopatra, by French author Gautier de Costes:

since you are at Leasure to consider the moone you may bee enough to reade Cleopatra, therefore I have sent you three Tomes. When you have done with those you shall have the rest, and I beleeve they will please, there is a story of Artemise that I will recomende to you, her disposition I like extreamly, it has a great deal of Gratitude int, and if you meet with one Brittomart pray send mee word how you like him.⁹⁷

Contrary to many conceptions about the genre, there is little evidence in Osborne’s letters that women were the primary readers of romance. At one point Osborne suggested that Temple won’t have time for reading, writing, ‘what an asse I am to think you can bee idle enough at London to reade Romances’.⁹⁸ However, the implication here is that a lack of free time is the only thing preventing him, not a dislike or disapproval of the genre. Instead, she exchanged books with him frequently, and they discussed what they both read in detail.

Apart from the exchange of romances between the couple, the habit of sharing books with a wider circle of friends and acquaintances is made clear in the letters, with Osborne often asking Temple to send books back to her so she could pass them on to others. She wrote at one point:

If you have done with the first Part of Cyrus I should bee glad Mr Hollingsworth had it, because I mentioned some such thing in my Last to my Lady, but there is noe hast of restoreing the other unlesse she should send to mee for it which I beleeve she will not. I have a third Tome heer against you have done with the second, and to Encourage you let mee assure you that the more you read of them you will like them still better.⁹⁹

Mr Hollingsworth appears to have been a retainer of the Lady mentioned, rather than a reader himself. It is likely that he was going to pass the book on to Lady Diana Rich, with whom Osborne often exchanged books.

Osborne emphasised her emotional, affective reading experiences. This was often something feared in anti-romance invectives: that women would feel too much for the characters of romance and that this was an uncritical response that could produce ill effects. However, Osborne shows no concern about her response to the text. When discussing Artamène, ou Le Grand Cyrus, the ten-part historical romance by Madeleine de Scudéry telling the story of the lovers Cyrus and Mandane, who were repeatedly kept apart, Osborne wrote of one character, ‘i’le swear I cryed for her when I read it first tough shee were an imaginary person’.¹⁰⁰ She clearly felt a deep connection to the characters in books; as Trolander has pointed out, she ‘referred to [prose romances’] characters as real individuals … Indeed, her vouching for such friends as Lady Diana Rich was often done in terms similar to vouching for characters in Le Caprenède’s Cléopâtre’.¹⁰¹ He suggests that this was born of a desire to see Temple ‘come to know and like them as people’ and part of Osborne’s effort to strengthen the affective bonds with her intended.¹⁰²

It is possible to glean many details about Osborne’s reading habits and preferences from her letters, often connecting to wider developments within the prose romance genre. She enjoyed De Scudéry’s books, which were the most popular romantic texts of the mid-seventeenth century.¹⁰³ De Scudéry published under her brother’s name throughout her life, and Osborne clearly believed that Georges was the author, although she does note certain rumours about Madeleine’s role in the authorship (and her apparently unfortunate appearance):

They say the Gentelman that writes this Romance has a Sister that lives with him as Mayde and she furnishes him with all the litle Story’s that come between soe that hee only Contrives the maine designe and when hee wants somthing to Entertaine his company withal hee call’s to her for it. Shee has an Exelent fancy sure, and a great deal of witt, but I am sorry to tell it you, they say tis the most ilfavourd Creatur that ever was borne, and it is often soe, how seldome doe wee see a person Exelent in any thing but they have some great deffect with it that pulls them low enough to make them Equall with Other People, and there is Justice in’t.¹⁰⁴

Osborne has often been known for her criticism of Margaret Cavendish, of whom she commented that ‘there are many soberer People in Bedlam’ and wrote ‘the poore woman is a litle distracted, she could never bee soe rediculous else as to venture at writeing book’s’.¹⁰⁵ This criticism of women writers has been discussed many times, and, as Carrie Hintz has noted, ‘cast within the study of seventeenth-century women writers as the conservative counterpart to the daring polymath Cavendish, Osborne has been viewed by feminist scholars primarily as the voice of repression and of scorn’.¹⁰⁶ However, her assessment of De Scudéry tempers this; she did not seem to condemn her for writing, although she did imply that it had caused her to become an ‘ilfavourd Creatur’. There is, however, a clear recognition of De Scudéry’s literary talents. Again, Osborne was able to assess the literary merit of a text despite potential controversy surrounding its publication, genre and author, displaying her critical reading faculties.

Osborne had a preference for French romances, and usually read the texts in the original language.¹⁰⁷ When she did read in English, she often provided acerbic critiques of the translators and translations:

I have noe Patience neither for these Translatours of Romances. I mett with Polexandre and L’Illustre Bassa, both soe disguised that I who am theire old acquaintance hardly knew them, besydes that they were still soe much french in words and Phrases that twas imposible for one that understood not french to make any thing of them.¹⁰⁸

She went on to take further issue with the translation of L’Illustre Bassa, another work of De Scudéry, criticising the writing style and speech:

Another fault I finde too in the stile, tis affected. Ambition’d is a great word with him, and ignore; my concerne, or of great concern, is it seem’s properer then concernment; and though hee makes his People say fine handsome things to one another yet they are not Easy and Naïve like the french, and there is a little harshnesse in most of the discourses that one would take to bee the fault of the Translatour rather then of an Author.¹⁰⁹

This was probably referring to the translation undertaken by Henry Cogan, which was first printed in 1652.¹¹⁰ This was two years before the letter was written, indicating that Osborne kept up to date with new publications. She clearly read with a very sharp critical eye, focusing on details of the text, such as the specific language and phrasing used in the translation.

It has become commonplace for scholars looking at Osborne to attribute her feelings for the characters and her enjoyment of romances to her frustrated courtship with Temple. Their families would not allow them to marry for various political and financial reasons. According to James How, Osborne’s letters ‘become a sustained attempt to open up a new form of imaginary social space in which she could be alone with Temple’.¹¹¹ Similarly, Femke Molekamp has argued that ‘Osborne weaves her reading of romances into her letters to engage an affective reading process serving as an outlet for the sorrows of the romantic trials which she and Temple endure, and to associate their courtship with the turn from anguish to regeneration usual to the structure of romance’.¹¹² Hintz sees the exchange about romantic between Osborne and Temple as an attempt on her part to mould their future relationship, arguing that ‘romances were another venue for Osborne to exert control over Temple’s opinions, but also to inculcate him into the process of openly discussing relationships and comportment with her’.¹¹³

This focus on the relationship between Osborne and Temple has led scholars to argue that Osborne saw herself in romances. Helen Wilcox and Sheila Ottway have argued that Osborne’s imaginative world, informed by the romance genre, allowed her an alternative to reality, and that ‘she envisages Temple and herself as the archetypal star-crossed lovers of fictional romance’.¹¹⁴ This presumes that Osborne was using reading as a form of escapism rather than to understand the world around her. This buys into the rhetoric linking romantic fiction, pleasure and women. Suggesting that romances provided Osborne with the opportunity to escape the world detaches her reading from any real-world or potentially useful (itself a loaded term) implications. Moreover, it connotes a certain kind of reading, which only results in personal pleasure, rather than improved understanding.

There is some evidence of Osborne’s escapist reading of works other than romantic fiction, for example when Osborne compared herself and Temple to Baucis and Philemon, a charitable old married couple who appear in Ovid’s Metamorphoses:

Doe you remember Arme and the little house there [?] shall we goe thither [?] that’s next to being out of the worlde[.] there wee might live like Baucis and Philemon, grow old together in our litle Cottage and for our Charrity to some shipwrakt stranger obtaine the blessing of dyeing both at the same time. How idly I talk tis because the Storry pleases mee, none in Ovide soe much. I remember I cryed when I read it, mee thought they were the perfectest Characters of a con[ten]ted marriage where Piety and Live were all theire wealth and in their poverty feasted the Gods where rich men shutt them out.¹¹⁵

She clearly was attracted to this romantic vision of married life, and it is hard to dispute that she was using this story to outline a future for herself and Temple. However, the causal link scholars have found between Osborne’s romance reading and her own romantic life is problematic. It echoes the fears that many conduct book writers had about women admiring and imitating the behaviour of romantic heroines. Moreover, perhaps the clearest problem with this approach is the way that it centres on Osborne and Temple’s courtship as the most important facet of her epistolary self-presentation. Seeing Osborne’s literary motivations and preferences as being solely due to her desire to create an imaginary world where she could live out a successful courtship is reductive, not allowing her an identity outside of her romantic relationship. Furthermore, it is not borne out by Osborne’s writings. In one passage, she described a story in Parthenissa, the serially published 1650s prose romance by Roger Boyle, first Earl of Orrery, saying of the female protagonist:

She was in a besieged Towne, and perswaded all those of her Sexe to goe out with her to the Enemy (which were a barbarous People) and dye by theire swords, that the provision of the Towne might last the longer for such as were able to doe service in deffending it. But how angry I was to see him spoile this againe, by bringing out a letter this woman left behind her for the Governour of the Towne, where she discovers a passion for him and makes that the reason why she did it. I confesse I have noe patience for our faiseurs de Romance, when they make women court.¹¹⁶

Osborne’s larger point was that it was improper for women to actively court, but there is perhaps another point underlying this about women’s actions not being motivated by men. It may be that, instead of using romances to live out her fantasy of a courtship with Temple, Osborne found models for female behaviour within them. Her annoyance at Boyle’s character motivations reflects her frustration in trying to find roles in fiction that she could empathise with and emulate. Her display of these emotions in her letters to Temple shows a complex character construction, one which did not necessarily conform to contemporary feminine ideals, but which was nevertheless engaged with concepts of femininity.

This link between women writing about romance and their own romantic lives is apparent in other scholarly works examining the early modern period. Raymond Anselment made a similar suggestion about writing choices being motivated by personal romantic relationships when he said of Elizabeth Delaval: ‘[her] meditations become more specifically personal as she responds to the frustrations of romance and the disillusionment of marriage’.¹¹⁷ This is not to suggest that personal tribulations and romantic feelings would not have had any effect on women’s reading and interpretation, but rather that we do women in the past a disservice by considering romance, courtship and relationships with the men in their lives as the sole motivation behind their reading and writing. Instead, they had much more complex, individual responses to texts, born of various personal circumstances and preferences, which informed both what they read and how they wrote about their reading habits. Moreover, their reading was not driven by escapist fantasy, but was both critical and emotional, allowing them to find ‘profit’ in the stories.

Conclusion

In their records of romance reading, then, the women surveyed here reveal a range of reading practices. They were not simply reading for fun, or in a way that implies seduction or addiction to the genre, with little regard for intellectualism. Instead, they read carefully and critically, analysing language and character construction. Some were also looking to find lessons in romances concerning their behaviour in society. This prefigures the suggestions of advice writers such as Hannah Woolley and Judith Drake who believed that romances could be beneficial in teaching women proper behaviour and conversation. While they may have been frustrated in this aim, as Mary Hatton Helsby was, they nevertheless were approaching the genre with a critical and intellectual eye. This, however, did not lessen the enjoyment they often record taking from the books. To create a distinction between emotional and rational reading, as both contemporary and scholarly accounts often do, does not take into account the complexity of the reading experience.

The differing approaches to romance reading of the women surveyed here exemplify the complexity of the relationship between gender and reading in the early modern period. On the one hand, we have Elizabeth Delaval, following strict gender conventions about proper feminine behaviour and reading habits. She also replicated the anxiety felt about the adverse effects of romances on young female readers. On the other, Dorothy Osborne openly enjoyed reading romances, and appeared to feel no inhibitions about admitting this. Osborne may have felt freer to express her literary preferences, in writing letters to personal acquaintances – although there is, of course, no guarantee that she envisaged her letters as private between her and Temple; indeed, it is likely she knew that they would be read more widely, as letters were often shared between family members and friends. She clearly made a very different choice to Delaval with regards to representing her reading habits, and thus aligned herself with a different manifestation of early modern femininity, more complex than the dichotomous idealised or sexually transgressive female readers constructed by contemporary gender norms.

This way of using romantic fiction appears to have emerged in the middle of the century. Osborne and Hatton were writing in the early 1650s; Delaval in the 1670s. This ties in with the increasing popularity of the prose romance in the mid-seventeenth century, when the genre proliferated, largely due to an influx of French texts. This is also the point at which Newcomb identifies a class split in the idea of women reading romances; in the mid-seventeenth century it became more acceptable for upper-class women to read these texts, but the dangers associated with romances became attached specifically to lower-class women.¹¹⁸ That is not to say that women were not reading romances before the 1650s; evidence from Elizabeth Isham, writing in the 1630s, and Anne Clifford demonstrates the presence of romances on women’s bookshelves throughout the seventeenth century. Perhaps it is simply that by the middle of the century gentry and noblewomen were able to present their romance reading as more ‘serious’ and were more likely to use romances in their efforts at textual self-construction.

Whatever the prescriptive conventions and moralistic conversation surrounding romance reading in the seventeenth century, put forward mainly in advice literature, it is clear that it was not unusual for women to read romances.¹¹⁹ While we can make suppositions about the popularity of romantic fiction, however, it remains clear that this was an area of debate for many early modern men and women, and therefore the ways in which women choose to represent their romance reading become highly significant. This agency should not be forgotten in modern discussions of seventeenth-century women romance readers. It is simplistic to portray them as engaging in a frivolous pastime or assume that their reading choices and opinions were governed by their relationships with the men in their lives.

Instead, they responded in highly individual ways and used romance reading in their construction of their own identity. Some, such as Delaval, chose to replicate tropes and narratives found in advice literature, emphasising their exemplary pious femininity and engaging in an act of self-justification. Some engaged in literary critiques, but this clearly came from familiarity with the genre. Others, such as Dorothy Osborne, Anne Clifford and Elizabeth Isham, took pleasure in their reading. Osborne in particular was keen to discuss it with others, and felt a deep, personal connection to the characters. Reading romantic fiction, and discussing it with others, provided a way for women to explore their lives and themselves. They used and adapted the genre to their own ends through interpretation and discussion.

Notes

1. 1.  Mary Evelyn, daughter of John Evelyn the diarist: Correspondence and papers: [1675]–1685, Evelyn Papers Vol. CCLXXIII, Add MS 78440, f46r, British Library, London. Mary Evelyn was known for her literary talents and interests: see Gillian Darley, John Evelyn: Living for Ingenuity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 264.

2. 2.  Ann Blair has argued that ‘humanists advocated the careful study of models of ancient rhetoric, notably by copying out the best passages from one’s reading in a notebook, where they could be retrieved for emulation and citation’. Ann M. Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 69.

3. 3.  Douglas D. C. Chambers and David Galbraith, ed., The Letterbooks of John Evelyn (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), 688.

4. 4.  As Julie Eckerle has noted, women’s ‘life-writing’ (by which she terms diaries, memoirs, meditations, letters and other autobiographical texts) gives us a good insight into women’s reading of romances, although only a few explained their thoughts about the genre in detail. See Julie A. Eckerle, Romancing the Self in Early Modern Englishwomen’s Life Writing (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 51–52.

5. 5.  See, for example, Steve Mentz, Romance for Sale in Early Modern England: The Rise of Prose Fiction (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006).

6. 6.  For more on the genre of chick lit, see Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young, ed., Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction (London: Routledge, 2006); Lynne Pearce, ‘Popular Romance and its Readers’, in A Companion to Romance: From Classical to Contemporary, ed. Corinne Saunders (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 521–538.

7. 7.  Dorinda Outram, The Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 16.

8. 8.  Steven N. Zwicker, ‘The Constitution of Opinion and the Pacification of Reading’, in Reading, Society and Politics in Early Modern England, ed. Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 311.

9. 9.  Zwicker, ‘The Constitution of Opinion’, 311.

10. 10.  Josephine A. Roberts, ‘Extracts from Arcadia in the Manuscript Notebook of Lady Katherine Manners’, Notes and Queries 28, no. 1 (1981): 35–36.

11. 11.  Roberts, ‘Extracts from Arcadia’, 35.

12. 12.  Admittedly, Arcadia was recognised at the time for its poetry and innovative style, so perhaps has a slightly different impact than other romance works, but Manners’ use of it alongside religious sources in particular is notable. See Gavin Alexander, ‘Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia’, in The Oxford Handbook of English Prose, 1500–1640, ed. Andrew Hadfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), 219–234. However, it has been argued that Arcadia was classed very differently when read by male versus female readers – Mary Ellen Lamb has argued that men read it as a ‘serious work’ but that women readers of Arcadia were generally represented as ‘culpably frivolous and dangerously sexual’. See Mary Ellen Lamb, Gender and Authorship in the Sidney Circle (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 112.

13. 13.  Rebecca Tierney-Hynes, Novel Minds: Philosophers and Romance Readers, 1680–1740 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 4.

14. 14.  Richard Allestree, The Ladies Calling. In Two Parts. By the Author of the Whole Duty of Man, The Causes of the Decay of Christian Piety, and the Gentlemans Calling (Oxford: Printed at the Theater, 1673), 151.

15. 15.  Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

16. 16.  Laura Gowing has pointed out that in the early modern period, lust was seen as a natural (and sinful) part of female nature, whereas chastity was something they should aspire to. See Laura Gowing, Gender Relations in Early Modern England (Harlow: Pearson, 2012), 17.

17. 17.  Nicholas Breton, The Good and the Badde, Or Descriptions of the Worthies, and Unworthies of this Age. Where the Best may see their Graces, and the Worst discerne their Baseness (London: Printed by George Purslowe for Iohn Budge, 1616), 30.

18. 18.  Breton, The Good and the Badde, 28.

19. 19.  Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England, 1500–1800 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 380.

20. 20.  Elaine Leong has noted Brathwaite’s prescriptions for reading, paying particular attention to how he directs women to read herbals. See Elaine Leong, ‘ “Herbals she Peruseth”: Reading Medicine in Early Modern England’, Renaissance Studies 28, no. 4 (2014): 556–578.

21. 21.  Richard Brathwaite, The English Gentlewoman, drawne out to the full body: Expressing What Habilliments doe best attire her, What Ornaments doe best adorne her, What Complements doe best accomplish her (London: Printed by B. Alsop and T Fawcet, for Michael Sparke, dwelling in Greene Arbor, 1631), 139.

22. 22.  The womb was often described in emotional terms in the early modern period and could be constructed as a malevolent force. Various conditions, including the ‘frenzy’ of the womb, were thought to be caused by excess seed or fluid and connected to lust and hysteria. See Amy Kenny, Humoral Wombs on the Shakespearean Stage (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).

23. 23.  Nicholas Culpeper, Culpeper’s Directory for Mid Wives: Or, a Guide for Women. The Second Part (London: Printed by Peter Cole, 1662), 115.

24. 24.  Culpeper, Culpeper’s Directory for Mid Wives, 116. My italics.

25. 25.  The physiological effects of reading are a very fruitful line of enquiry, and were central to early modern concerns surrounding reading. For more on this, see Johns, The Nature of the Book.

26. 26.  Lori Humphrey Newcomb has demonstrated the changing attitudes towards romance reading for both men and women, arguing the mid-seventeenth century onwards saw increasing appreciation of the genre, connected to the rise and respectability of leisure reading practices. See Lori Humphrey Newcomb, ‘Gendering Prose Romance in Renaissance England’, in A Companion to Romance: From Classical to Contemporary, ed. Corinne Saunders (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 121–139.

27. 27.  Hannah Woolley, The Gentlewomans Companion; O, A Guide to the Female Sex: Containing Directions of Behaviour, in all Places, Companies, Relations, and Conditions, from their Childhood down to Old Age: Viz. As, Children to Parents. Scholars to Governours. Single to Servants. Virgins to Suitors. Married to Husbands. Huswifes to the House. Mistresses to the Servants. Mothers to Children. Widows to the World. Prudent to all. With Letters and Discourses upon all Occasions. Whereunto is added, A Guide for Cook-Maids, Dairy-Maids, Chamber-Maids, and all others that go to Service. The whole being an exact Rule for the Female Sex in General (London: Printed by A. Maxwell for Dorman Nowman, 1673), 9.

28. 28.  Newcomb, ‘Gendering Prose Romance’, 137.

29. 29.  Woolley, The Gentlewomans Companion, 77.

30. 30.  For more on women, reading and ballads, see Sandra Clark, ‘The Broadside Ballad and the Woman’s Voice’, in Debating Gender in Early Modern England 1500–1700, ed. Cristina Malcolmson and Mihoko Suzuki (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 103–120.

31. 31.  [Judith Drake], An Essay in Defence of the Female Sex. In which are inserted the Characters of A Pedant, A Squire, A Beau, A Vertuoso, A Poetaster, A City-Critick &c. In a Letter to a Lady, Written by a Lady (London: Printed for A. Roper and E. Wilkinson, and R. Clavel, 1696), 57.

32. 32.  Heidi Brayman Hackel has reproduced the countess’ library catalogue, which is held in the Huntington Library. See Brayman Hackel, ‘The Countess of Bridgewater’s London Library’, in Books and Readers in Early Modern England: Material Studies, ed. Jennifer Anderson and Elizabeth Sauer (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 138–159.

33. 33.  Louise K. Horowitz, ‘Pastoral Fiction’, in A New History of French Literature, ed. Denis Hollier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 261–262.

34. 34.  Brayman Hackel, ‘The Countess of Bridgewater’s London Library’, 147–154.

35. 35.  Hannah Jane DeGroff, ‘Textual Networks and the Country House: The 3rd Earl of Carlisle at Castle Howard’ (PhD thesis, University of York, 2012). DeGroff has very usefully transcribed the book list, entitled ‘My Laydes Books at Noward August 31: 1693’ – see pages 206–209.

36. 36.  David McKitterick, ‘Women and Their Books in Seventeenth-Century England: The Case of Elizabeth Puckering’, The Library 1, Seventh Series (2000): 376.

37. 37.  There are many reasons why these signatures may have been inscribed. They cannot be taken as definite evidence of readership. Sometimes the names written on the flyleaves of books are obviously pen trials, and there is no evidence that the woman then went on to read the book she had just signed. Instead, it may have simply been the use of a blank page that was immediately at hand. In this case, women tend to practise writing their name several times over, at different points on the page, without any clear acknowledgement of the book itself. However, the common occurrence of the phrase ‘her book’ indicates a different intention behind the inscription. These appear to be signs of book ownership, possibly distinguishing the text from others in the household, or providing a record if it was lent to someone.

38. 38.  Brayman Hackel speculates about the question of readership in her study of Frances Stanley Egerton’s books, noting that they do not contain marginalia or other signs of reading. She asks, ‘What are we to make of this absence? Did Lady Bridgewater merely possess her books as objects of status? Were they read aloud to her? Did she read them without marking in them? If so, another series of questions arises about why she did not mark her books as an active reader: did she not consider herself a serious reader? Did she not re-read her books? Or did she, like her daughter-in-law, read them and make notes elsewhere?’ Brayman Hackel, ‘The Countess of Bridgewater’s London Library’, 145–146.

39. 39.  There have been several articles dedicated to Clifford’s reading and annotating of specific books, including, most recently, Georgianna Ziegler, ‘Lady Anne Clifford Reads John Selden’, in Early Modern English Marginalia, ed. Katherine Acheson (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019), 134–154.

40. 40.  Edith Snook, Women, Reading, and the Cultural Politics of Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 1.

41. 41.  Paul Salzman, ‘Royalist Epic and Romance’, in The Cambridge Companion to Writing of the English Revolution, ed. N. H. Keeble (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 215–232. The exact nature of the political commentary in Arcadia has been debated, but Fred Schurink used various readers marks in a copy of Arcadia housed at the Folger Shakespeare Library to examine its politics. See Fred Schurink, ‘ “Like a Hand in the Margine of a Booke”: William Blount’s Marginalia and the Politics of Sidney’s Arcadia’, Review of English Studies 59, no. 238 (2008): 1–24.

42. 42.  Salzman, ‘Royalist Epic and Romance’, 221.

43. 43.  Salzman, ‘Royalist Epic and Romance’, 222.

44. 44.  For more on Barclay’s text, see Helen Moore, ‘Romance: Amadis de Gaule and John Barclay’s Argenis’, in The Oxford Handbook of English Prose, 1500–1640, ed. Andrew Hadfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 59–76.

45. 45.  John Barclay, Barclay his Argenis: Or, The Loves of Poliarchus and Argenis: Faithfully translated out of Latine into English, By Kingesmill Long, Gent. (London: Printed by G. P. for Henry Seile, 1625). RB 97024, Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino. As Brayman points out, the dates recorded mean that Clifford and the scribe, most likely a member of her household, read the book ‘at the fairly voracious pace of forty folio pages a day’. According to Brayman, it would take a modern reader two and a half hours to read forty pages aloud, without interruption, giving a useful insight into the amount of time Clifford spent on oral reading and the ‘seriousness with which some, albeit quirky, book owners treated their reading of prose fiction’. Heidi Brayman Hackel, ‘Lady Anne Clifford as Reader, Annotator and Book Collector’, in Lady Anne Clifford: Culture, Patronage and Gender in 17th-Century Britain, ed. Karen Hearn and Lyn Hulse (Leeds: Yorkshire Archaeological Society, 2009), 106.

46. 46.  E.g. Barclay, Argenis, 97, 246.

47. 47.  Barclay, Argenis, 78.

48. 48.  Barclay, Argenis, 78.

49. 49.  Barclay, Argenis, 78.

50. 50.  Barclay, Argenis, 305.

51. 51.  Harriet Archer and Andrew Hadfield, ed., A Mirror for Magistrates in Context: Literature, History and Politics in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). See Chapter 5 for a more detailed discussion of these texts.

52. 52.  See, for example, Stephen Orgel, ‘Marginal Maternity: Reading Lady Anne Clifford’s A Mirror for Magistrates’, in Printing and Parenting in Early Modern England, ed. Douglas A. Brooks (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 267–289.

53. 53.  Brayman Hackel, ‘Lady Anne Clifford as Reader’, 108.

54. 54.  While signatures may not prove readership, they do at least point to an interaction with books and manuscripts, and the importance of them as material objects. The act of writing a name in a book, whether to indicate ownership, stake a knowledge claim or simply as a form of writing practice, reveals various relationships with a book, either as an object or as a source of information and ideas (or both). These inscriptions tell us not only about this relationship but also about interpersonal relationships in which books become an actor; for example, in the case of gift inscriptions, or in competing ownership claims.

55. 55.  Vital d’Audiguier, A Tragi-Comicall History of Our Times, Under the Borrowed Names of Lisander and Calista (London: Printed by R. Y. for G. Lathum, 1635), STC 907 (copy 1), Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC.

56. 56.  Jean Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin, Ariana. In Two Parts. As it was translated out of the French, and presented to my Lord Chamberlaine (London: Printed by John Dawson for Thomas Walkley, 1641). Hfc31 010, Beinecke Library, New Haven.

57. 57.  M. Le Roy Gomberville, The History of Polexander: in Five Bookes. Done into English by William Browne, Gent. For the Right Honourable Philip, Earle of Pembroke and Montgomery, &c. (London: Printed by Tho: Harper, for Thomas Walkley, 1647). RB 113855, Huntington Library.

58. 58.  Elspeth Graham, Hilary Hinds, Elaine Hobby and Helen Wilcox, ‘Introduction’, in Her Own Life: Autobiographical Writings by Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen, ed. Elspeth Graham, Hilary Hinds, Elaine Hobby and Helen Wilcox (London: Routledge, 1989), 17.

59. 59.  She argues that ‘Rich’s personal experience is transformed, through the writing act, into a romantic paradigm … [her] indebtedness to romantic motifs and structures is everywhere apparent’. Wray suggests that this use of romance motifs was done in order to give Rich power over her situation, and to reset a reality in which her husband was violent and abusive, to one in which she enjoyed a happy marriage and over which she had some control. Ramona Wray, ‘Recovering the Reading of Renaissance Englishwomen: Deployments of Autobiography’, Critical Survey 12, no. 2 (2000): 36, 40. Similarly, Eckerle has argued that that ‘despite a critical assumption that early modern Englishwomen’s life writing was predominantly spiritual in nature, the romance genre exerted a powerful and pervasive pressure on women’s life writing – and self-formation – during this time’. Eckerle, Romancing the Self, 4.

60. 60.  Eckerle has found evidence of women strategically repurposing the romantic genre, and argues that romantic fiction gave women ‘an imaginative and narrative landscape within which to explore and represent personal experience’. Eckerle, Romancing the Self, 20.

61. 61.  Margaret J. M. Ezell, ‘Delaval, Elizabeth’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004, accessed September 19, 2023, www-oxforddnb-com.libproxy.york.ac.uk/display/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-68215?rskey=LKNd5H&result=1.

62. 62.  Elizabeth Delaval, The Meditations of Lady Elizabeth Delaval, Written Between 1662 and 1671, ed. Douglas G. Greene (Gateshead: The Surtees Society, Northumberland Press Limited, 1978), 11–12.

63. 63.  Delaval, The Meditations of Lady Elizabeth Delaval, 26.

64. 64.  Margaret Ezell has explored the ways in which Delaval’s manuscript exposes the difficulty of defining genre in the early modern period; she argues that Delaval used conventions of romance fiction rather than spiritual meditations, and that, as Delaval did not title her work, the classification of ‘meditation’ has been imposed by later editors. However, Ezell does not specifically consider Delaval’s reading habits, but rather how contemporary prose fiction influenced her writing style and her presentation of personal relationships within the manuscript. Margaret J. M. Ezell, ‘Elizabeth Delaval’s Spiritual Heroine: Thoughts on Redefining Manuscript Texts by Early Women Writers’, in English Manuscript Studies, Volume 3, ed. Peter Beal and Jeremy Griffiths (London: The British Library, 1992), 223.

65. 65.  Joseph F. Chorpenning, ‘Santa Teresa’s Libro de la Vida as Romance: Narrative Movements and Heroic Quest’, Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 14, no. 1 (1989): 52.

66. 66.  Jennifer R. Goodman, ‘ “That wommen holde in ful greet reverence”: Mothers and Daughters Reading Chivalric Romances’, in Women, the Book and the Worldly: Selected Proceedings of the St Hilda’s Conference, 1993, Volume II, ed. Lesley Smith and Jane H. M. Taylor (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1995), 28–29.

67. 67.  These books are also mentioned by Dorothy Osborne – see below.

68. 68.  Delaval, The Meditations of Lady Elizabeth Delaval, 32.

69. 69.  Alice Eardley has argued that the publication of these aforementioned works, alongside De Scudéry’s Ibrahim and Clélie, was part of an attempt by the publisher Humphrey Moseley to foster a market for heroic romances in the 1650s. Eardley has also argued that these books had a broad middle-class readership, contrary to some modern scholarship that has claimed they had a mainly aristocratic audience in England. See Alice Eardley, ‘Marketing Aspiration: Fact, Fiction, and the Publication of French Romance in Mid-Seventeenth-Century England’, in Seventeenth-Century Fiction: Text and Transmission, ed. Jacqueline Gomski and Isabelle Moreau (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 130–142.

70. 70.  Delaval, The Meditations of Lady Elizabeth Delaval, 32.

71. 71.  Delaval, The Meditations of Lady Elizabeth Delaval, 33. This would have been in 1659, during the Interregnum, when her Royalist parents were still in exile on the continent.

72. 72.  Newcomb, ‘Gendering Prose Romance’, 134.

73. 73.  Delaval, The Meditations of Lady Elizabeth Delaval, 32.

74. 74.  Delaval, The Meditations of Lady Elizabeth Delaval, 62.

75. 75.  Delaval, The Meditations of Lady Elizabeth Delaval, 45.

76. 76.  Delaval, The Meditations of Lady Elizabeth Delaval, 117.

77. 77.  As Julie Eckerle has noted, Isham’s text is ‘one of the earliest female-authored prose narratives about the self’ and ‘provides extraordinary insight into her own reading and writing habits’. Julie A. Eckerle, ‘Coming to Knowledge: Elizabeth Isham’s Autobiography and the Self-Construction of an Intellectual Woman’, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 25, no. 1 (2010): 97.

78. 78.  Isaac Stephens has pointed out Isham’s apparent rejection of some strictures for women’s reading, noting that she also read Ovid’s Metamorphoses. See Isaac Stephens, The Gentlewoman’s Remembrance: Patriarchy, Piety, and Singlehood in Early Stuart England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 156.

79. 79.  Elizabeth Isham, Book of Rememberance, f26r, accessed August 30, 2023, http://web.warwick.ac.uk/english/perdita/Isham/bor_p26r.htm.

80. 80.  For more on Isham’s mental health, see Erin Sullivan, Beyond Melancholy: Sadness and Selfhood in Renaissance England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 133–139.

81. 81.  Anne Cotterill, ‘Fit Words at the “pitts brinke”: The Achievement of Elizabeth Isham’, Huntington Library Quarterly 73, no. 2 (2010): 229.

82. 82.  Isaac Stephens has described her text as an ‘intense form of puritan life-writing’. Isaac Stephens, ‘ “My Cheefest Work”: The Making of the Spiritual Autobiography of Elizabeth Isham’, Midland History 34, no. 2 (2009): 195.

83. 83.  Erica Longfellow has argued that Isham ‘displayed little awareness of gendered restrictions on women’s intellectual activity’, attributing this partly to the fact that she did not record reading any advice literature aimed at women (although this not only underestimates the pervasiveness of gender norms but also assumes that Isham recorded every item she read). See Erica Longfellow, ‘ “Take unto ye words”: Elizabeth Isham’s “Booke of Rememberance” and Puritan Cultural Forms’, in The Intellectual Culture of Puritan Women, 1558–1680, ed. Johanna Harris and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 125.

84. 84.  Isham, Book of Rememberance, f26r.

85. 85.  Memoirists and diarists such as Margaret Hoby, Grace Mildmay, Ann Fanshawe and Anne Halkett all discussed their reading habits, but did not make mention of romantic fiction. See Margaret Hoby, The Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby, edited by Dorothy M. Meads (London: Routledge, 1930); Linda Pollock, ed., With Faith and Physic: The Life of a Tudor Gentlewoman, Lady Grace Mildmay, 1552–1620 (London: Collins & Brown, 1993); John Loftis, ed., The Memoirs of Anne, Lady Halkett and Ann, Lady Fanshawe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979). Eckerle has argued that both Anne Halkett and Ann Fanshawe draw heavily on the themes of romances in their autobiographies, demonstrating their influence even if they do not necessarily record reading them. See Eckerle, Romancing the Self.

86. 86.  See, for example, James Daybell, The Material Letter in Early Modern England: Manuscript Letters and the Cultures and Practices of Letter-Writing, 1512–1635 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

87. 87.  Eckerle, Romancing the Self, 51.

88. 88.  Eckerle, Romancing the Self, 52. Samuel Pepys also bought Elizabeth a copy of De Scudéry’s Ibrahim, ou L’illustre Bassa in 1668. See Gesa Stedman, Cultural Exchange in Seventeenth-Century France and England (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), 94.

89. 89.  Kate Loveman, Samuel Pepys and His Books: Reading, Newsgathering, and Sociability, 1660–1703 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 151.

90. 90.  Sara Heller Mendelson, ‘The Weightiest Business: Marriage in an Upper-Gentry Family in Seventeenth-Century England’, Past & Present 85 (1979): 130 (note 26).

91. 91.  Mary Hatton Helsby, Autograph letters signed from Mary Hatton Helsby to various recipients [manuscript], 1651–1668. X.d.493, (6), Folger Shakespeare Library.

92. 92.  Emily Griffiths Jones, ‘Romance, Narrative Vision, and Elect Community in Seventeenth-Century England’ (PhD thesis, Boston University, 2014), 22.

93. 93.  Paul Trolander, Literary Sociability in Early Modern England: The Epistolary Record (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2014), 165.

94. 94.  Mary Hatton to Randolph Helsby, March 27, 1654. X.d.493 (4).

95. 95.  The phrase ‘newe booke’ may mean that it was new to Helsby, but it may also mean that it was newly published. If this is the case, it was likely the edition of Spenser’s pastoral Shepherds Calendar, written in both Latin and English and printed in 1653. Edmund Spenser, Calendarium pastorale, sive Æglogæ duodecim, totidem anni mensibus accommodatæ. Anglicè olim scriptæ ab Edmundo Spensero anglorum poetarum principe: nunc autem eleganti Latino carmine donatæ a Theodoro Bathurst, aulæ Pembrokianæ apud Cantabrigienses aliquando socio (Londini: impensis M[ercy]. M[eighen]. T[homas]. C[ollins]. & G. Bedell, 1653).

96. 96.  Osborne has often been commended for her writing style, with scholars such as Sheila Ottway suggesting that they read like an epistolary novel when taken in sequence. See Sheila Ottway, ‘Dorothy Osborne’s Love Letters: Novelistic Glimmerings and the Ovidian Self’, Prose Studies 19, no. 2 (1996): 149–159. Ottway recognises that ‘Osborne clearly would never have thought that her own letters constituted literature, but considered as a whole, the sequence of her love letters to Temple form a coherent narrative with its own momentum and sense of direction’ (p. 151).

97. 97.  Letter 10, March 1653. Dorothy Osborne, Dorothy Osborne: Letters to Sir William Temple, ed. Kenneth Parker (London: Penguin Books, 1987), 59–60.

98. 98.  Letter 9, February 1653. Osborne, Dorothy Osborne: Letters to Sir William Temple, 57.

99. 99.  Letter 27, June 1653. Osborne, Dorothy Osborne: Letters to Sir William Temple, 97.

100. 100.  Letter 39, September 1653. Osborne, Dorothy Osborne: Letters to Sir William Temple, 125.

101. 101.  Trolander, Literary Sociability, 164.

102. 102.  Trolander, Literary Sociability, 164.

103. 103.  Jane Donawerth, ed., Rhetorical Theory by Women before 1900: An Anthology (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 82. De Scudéry also published various essays and drew on classical authors to develop a theory of rhetoric and composition. She hosted a weekly salon at her house and was connected to women such as Mme. de Sévigné and Mme. de Lafayette. According to Nathalie Grande, she departed from the heroic romances of Calprenède and Gomberville, instead employing a classical aesthetic, aiming to both instruct and please her readers. See Nathalie Grande, ‘Quand le Roman Oeuvre en Moraliste: Madeleine de Scudéry et Clélie’, Dalhousie French Studies 27: Réflexions sur le genre moraliste au dix-septième siècle (1994): 31–49.

104. 104.  Letter 40, September 1653. Osborne, Dorothy Osborne: Letters to Sir William Temple, 128.

105. 105.  Letter 20, May 1653; Letter 19, April 1653. Osborne, Dorothy Osborne: Letters to Sir William Temple, 75–79.

106. 106.  Carrie Hintz, An Audience of One: Dorothy Osborne’s Letters to Sir William Temple, 1652–1654 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 3.

107. 107.  As Kenneth Parker has pointed out, her letters ‘corroborate the opinion, developed in our time, that the chief fictive prose form was that of the French romance’. Osborne, Dorothy Osborne: Letters to Sir William Temple, 37.

108. 108.  Letter 41, September 1653. Osborne, Dorothy Osborne: Letters to Sir William Temple, 131.

109. 109.  Letter 59, February 1654. Osborne, Dorothy Osborne: Letters to Sir William Temple, 180.

110. 110.  Madeleine de Scudéry, Ibrahim, or, the Illustrious Bassa. An Excellent New Romance. The Whole Work, In Foure Parts. Written in French by Monsieur de Scudery, and Now Englished by Henry Cogan, Gent (London: Printed for Humphry Moseley, William Bentley, and Thomas Heath, 1652).

111. 111.  James How, Epistolary Spaces: English Letter Writing from the Foundation of the Post Office to Richardson’s Clarissa (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 41.

112. 112.  Femke Molekamp, ‘Therapies for Melancholy and Inordinate Passion in the Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple (1652–1654)’, The Seventeenth Century 29, no. 3 (2014): 262.

113. 113.  Hintz, An Audience of One, 64.

114. 114.  Helen Wilcox and Sheila Ottway, ‘Women’s Histories’, in The Cambridge Companion to Writing of the English Revolution, ed. N. H. Keeble (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 157.

115. 115.  Letter 54, January 1654. Osborne, Dorothy Osborne: Letters to Sir William Temple, 164–165. Sasha Roberts has suggested that Ovid, although in the canon of respected literature, was often seen as dangerous to ‘vulnerable readers’ – i.e. women – because of the work’s amorous nature. See Sasha Roberts, Reading Shakespeare’s Poems in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 21.

116. 116.  Letter 59, February 1654. Osborne, Dorothy Osborne: Letters to Sir William Temple, 179–180.

117. 117.  Raymond Anselment, ‘Feminine Self-Reflection and the Seventeenth-Century Occasional Meditation’, The Seventeenth Century 26, no. 1 (2011): 72.

118. 118.  Newcomb, ‘Gendering Prose Romance’, 134–135.

119. 119.  As Eckerle has suggested, ‘romance had a firm place in early modern aristocratic life, offering an entertaining and pleasant way to pass the time, providing fodder for conversation, stimulating women’s intellect and creativity, and – perhaps most importantly, if somewhat paradoxically – contributing to the impression of good breeding among elite women, for whom the genre had powerful courtly associations’. Eckerle, Romancing the Self, 53.